(Chris Parker, Headline USA) Facebook fact-checkers have started censoring credible, top-ranking economists, and they are fighting back.
“It’s absolutely Orwellian,” economist Phillip Magness told Fox & Friends First. Magness, a senior research fellow with the American Institute of Economic Research, had his post flagged for defining a recession.
As the US economy slips into a recession, the Biden administration has been scrambling to redefine the word’s meaning.
White House Economic advisor Brian Deese notably said, “Two negative quarters of GDP growth is not the technical definition of recession.” However, he wrote in 2008, “Economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”
One CNN senior editor even hinted that the technical definition of a recession might be racist. “For starters, every single one of the eight members is White, and in fact the panel has never included a person of color,” she said of the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research.
Wikipedia’s editors have also joined the White House’s efforts to redefine the definition of a recession. Now, it seems that Facebook is following suit.
“Economists have typically defined this term as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth,” said Magness. “And yet, just sharing that caused Facebook to flag it and put a fact-check notice on my page.”
Magness has long been critical of the Biden administration’s economic policies on his Facebook page.
“The White House’s definitional wordsmithing could not overcome the onset of worsening economic realities in 1974, and its frequent appeals to the NBER determination could not run down the clock against a prolonged recession,” he said in his most recent uncensored post.
The White House’s attempts to redefine the definition of a recession seem to be backfiring.
“The Biden administration has spent a lot of energy trying to manage perceptions of the economy,” said Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle. As an example, she reminded readers, “Remember when inflation was going to be ‘temporary?'”
She continued by pointing out the strategy’s failure.
“Insisting that inflation was just a blip didn’t stop consumers from noticing that prices were rising. Nor did it protect Biden’s approval ratings, which dived even as the administration continued to insist that everything was fine.”
